The present invention relates to the field of power-driven conveyors. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and method for controlling the spacing of conveyed objects.
It is often desirable to space conveyed objects in a selected manner along the travel direction of a conveyor belt. The spacing enables downstream processing, such as sorting by diverting of selected objects onto an exit conveyor. For example, it may be desirable to have only one package on a section of a conveying system, such as a diverter, at a time. If the packages are of different sizes, such as often occurs in the shipping industry, then the gap between packages should be varied in order to ensure that only one package is on the selected section at a time, while maintaining the smallest possible gap between packages.